On May 8, 2020, I didn’t have to leave the front of my house to be in a different place; a place I’d never been in before. It was VE (Victory in Europe) Day, a valve through which the frustrations of lockdown could be released, and the residents of Newbury Gardens were making the most of it.

Picnic and folding tables were set up in front gardens and on drives. Flags, bunting and balloons fluttered around them. Sound systems played excerpts from Churchill’s broadcasts, plus songs that had been written to raise spirits during the war, and songs to celebrate that it was over (in Europe, at least). At 11 o’clock there was a two-minute silence in honour of those who had fought, and those who had died, for freedom. 

After a while, voices picked up again, and the partying resumed. People ventured off their own space to have a socially-distanced word, and even, here and there, a socially-distanced dance, with the neighbours. There are quite a few amateur musicians at our end of the street, and they were all keen to have a jam. Sally was on her sax, Steve on guitar, Harry on harmonica. And Teri had set up her full drum kit to the side of our front door. *

Also front of house for the first time was the green canopy of the gazebo, which we put up regularly in summer in the back garden — at least we did during those summers when you could invite family and friends into your home to eat. Under it were two cushioned garden chairs and a table, topped by a red-checked cloth. I’d helped set up the gazebo, but made myself scarce while it was being decorated.

Hanging from the front was a string of pennants, some red with white dots, some blue with white dots. At each of the two front corners three balloons bobbed on a string, one red, one white, one blue. And under the gazebo, suspended from more string over the table, hung three flags in red, white and blue. Union Flags. Union Jacks. In front of my home. And my wife was wearing one on a hat!

It would never have happened outside the house I grew up in. When I was a boy, in Portstewart, on the Causeway Coast in Northern Ireland, the Union Jack wasn’t something we associated with victory over the Nazis, and certainly not with a united kingdom. It was the flag of people who were Protestant and British. And my family were Catholic and Irish. 

Our neighbours were all Protestant, and my four brothers and I fought with the youngest of them from the age of seven or eight. It was the early 1960s, and we were still fighting the Second World War as recounted by our comics. Side by side, in a conflict scripted by The Victor and The Hotspur, Catholic boys and Protestant boys beat the hell out of the Germans and the Japanese. We fished together, we played football together, and we were as close as mates could be while we were all at primary school — separate primary schools. We never mentioned religion or allegiances, but we knew well enough what flags represented to our parents.

On drives to the homes of aunts and uncles, I’d sometimes glimpse from the car window kerbstones painted red-white-and-blue and, more rarely, green-white-and-gold: the colours of the Irish flag. As my vocabulary grew, Protestant and British were supplemented by “Unionist” and “Loyalist”; Catholic and Irish by “nationalist”. My parents kept as far from politics as it’s possible to do in Northern Ireland; at the polling booth, though, they voted religiously for the Social Democratic and Labour Party, so I suppose they could have been classed as constitutional nationalists: they hoped for a united Ireland, but didn’t expect to see it in their lifetime, and they had no time for the Provisional IRA.

Our VE Day gathering sent me back to the book Personal Views, in which John Hume, who was one of the founders of the SDLP, and one of the architects of the peace process, traces how his political philosophy developed.** In its early pages he recalls going to an election meeting at the top of his street in Derry when he was about 10 years old. It was a nationalist meeting, “and they were all waving flags and stirring up emotions for a united Ireland and the end of partition”. When Hume’s father saw that John was affected, he put a hand on his shoulder and told him, “Son, don’t get involved in that stuff… you can’t eat a flag.”

Hume says that lesson stayed with him: “Politics is about the right to existence — the right to life — bread on your table and a roof over your head. It doesn’t matter what flag you wrap around you when you stand in the dole queue or are forced to emigrate to another country to earn a living. A flag should symbolise the unity of the whole community. It should never be used as a party-political or sectional emblem.”

On VE Day, the Union Jacks flown in Newbury Gardens, and worn by a few passersby on tops and even on sunglasses, did symbolise the unity of the whole community, in a way they could never have done at the time and in the place where I was growing up. Sectionalism, sectarianism, were unavoidable there. It was to put them behind me that I went to London — though I couldn’t entirely escape them.

* * * 

I did little travelling as a child. My parents, running a seaside boarding house with a family of nine, didn’t have the time, the money or a minibus to take us on holiday. I remember one trip “over the border”, eating fish and chips on a bar stool in a pub in Letterkenny, in Donegal, and staying the night in a room upstairs. When we did leave home, it was usually to call on aunts and uncles or, more often, our granny. She lived less than 20 miles away, in Limavady, but at least one of the three or four of us crammed in the back of the car would feel sick along the way. En route to her house, and to treats in Aunt Sally’s shop a few doors up in Irish Green Street, we passed the massed conifers of Springwell Forest, a setting fit for the darkest of fairy tales. 

  There was one brief school trip to Liverpool, in 1973, I think, when I would have been 15. It was a rough overnight crossing on the ferry from Belfast, and most of us, including the teachers, turned green only a few hours into it, but we were cheered by a tour of the city, including “Paddy’s Wigwam” (the Catholic cathedral), and by an afternoon visit to Anfield, where we watched Liverpool — including Keegan, Callaghan and Toshack — beat Southampton. 

  It wasn’t until three years later that I first travelled by plane, from Belfast to London for my college interview. By the time my one-year course had finished in London, and before I started my first job, I’d sold what I suppose was my first piece of place-writing. It was about the Anchor Bar in Porstewart, where I had worked part-time before college, it appeared in The Morning Advertiser, the publicans’ daily (on June 28, 1977), and it was headlined “An Ulster pub where the terror is forgotten”.

  I’ve seen more of the island of Ireland since moving to London than I did while I was living there. I first went to Belfast at the age of 20, in 1978, to interview the chief constable of what was then the Royal Ulster Constabulary (now the Police Service of Northern Ireland), Sir Kenneth Newman. A couple of years later I returned to talk to his successor, Jack Hermon. On the first trip, I turned up at the fortified police headquarters in Knock Road with a cassette recorder, the size of a brick and nearly as heavy, inside a plastic bag. I don’t remember anyone looking inside that bag before I was admitted to Newman’s office.

  I aroused more suspicion in an RUC man at Belfast airport when I came home once on holiday. I’d picked up my bag from the carousel and was walking towards the exit when he asked me to step aside.

  Where had I come from and where was I headed, he asked.

  I told him. 

  “And where do you live?”

  “In London.”

  “What do you do there?”

  “I’m a journalist.” 

  “And who do you work for?”

  I pulled out a card and showed it to him. “Police Review.”

After Police Review, I spent a year as a sub-editor on the doctors’ weekly, General Practitioner. It was a plump and prosperous paper, partly because drug companies touting their wares had to spell out any side-effects, so ads were huge and issues ran to nearly 100 pages a week. While I was there, I wrote a speculative letter to Harry Evans, then editor of The Times, saying how much I admired what he had done at The Sunday Times and that I wanted to work for him.

I got a reply — not from Evans, but from John Grant, the managing editor, asking me to come into the office and see him. The interview was scheduled for after lunch, and Grant arrived late for it. It led nowhere, but it opened, after he’d glanced at my letter and skimpy CV, with this line: “I suppose, coming from Northern Ireland, one must be either a Cat or a Prot…?”

This lapsed Cat, having worked for a while as a freelance, joined The Sunday Times, which turned into a thoroughly Thatcherite paper under the editorship of Andrew Neil, and then The Daily Telegraph, which was a refreshingly questioning one under Max Hastings. Hastings was determined — as he would put in his 2002 memoir, Editor: An Inside Story of Newspapers — that “the Telegraph’s rabid brand of Conservatism would no longer prevail”. 

My first job on the paper was as deputy editor of the OpEd page, which was opposite the leader page but which didn’t trade in opinion. Our brief was to set out the whys and hows behind the who, what, where and when of the news pages. There had been yet another catastrophic flood in Bangladesh; why was the country so prone to natural disaster? Ben Johnson had been stripped of Olympic gold after winning the 100 metres in Seoul; how exactly were drug tests on athletes conducted?

(OpEd was overseen by Don Berry, one of the executives I had most admired on The Sunday Times, who had been brought on to the Telegraph by Hastings to transform the appearance of the paper. Its presence, on what had previously been a spill-over page for straight news stories, rankled for a while with some of the old guard. When the Telegraph, in common with many papers, moved from Fleet Street out to the former docklands in east London, it was first in a building at South Quay Plaza. In that building, OpEd was one floor above the newsroom. So we became known to the night editor, David Ruddock, as “those fancy features fuckers on the fourth floor”.)

Most of the writers I was lucky enough to work with on OpEd were older and more experienced than I. Among them was Maurice Weaver, a man with a pink face, a balding head and a disarming way on the phone with experts: “I’ve been asked to explain it, and I don’t know the first thing about it, but I’ve been assured you know a great deal. Do you think I might just pick your brains for a few minutes?” If, after those few minutes, Maurice hadn’t quite grasped what the expert was saying, he wouldn’t pretend otherwise. “I’m sorry,” he’d say. “I don’t understand. Would you mind running that past me again?”   

Maurice came into the office one day after a trip to Belfast and dropped a package on my desk. “I’ve brought you back a present,” he said. I opened the package (which I presume he’d been given as a souvenir) and found a tie emblazoned with the Red Hand of Ulster, an ancient symbol that has been used by both nationalists and unionists but is more closely associated with the latter.

“Thanks very much, Maurice,” I said. “But I wouldn’t be seen dead in that. In fact there are places back home where I could end up dead if I wore it.”

“But your name’s Kerr. Scottish name. So you must be a Prod…” (Protestants from Scotland and northern England were settled in the north of Ireland in the 17^th century, in the so-called Plantation of Ulster, with the specific aim of stabilising English government rule.)

I’d made calculations like that myself while I was growing up. You learned early in Northern Ireland to guess — sometimes wrongly — on the basis of a name or a workplace or the town where a person lived. I’d heard my elders, in the privacy of our kitchen, muttering about how such-and-such-a-place was “a black wee hole”. They meant that it was exclusively Protestant and Loyalist; that people from “our side of the house” — Catholics — weren’t welcome. 

I’d gone to London at 18 partly to get away from that. Yes, I wanted to spread my wings, but I also wanted to fly where nobody would be bothered whether I was a Catholic bird or a Protestant one. I imagined that when the Troubles were over I’d move back to work in Northern Ireland. Then I met Teri, and we married and had a family, and by the time the Good Friday Agreement came around (in April 1998), we were settled. I’ve gone back for holidays, but not to stay. “I love your family,” Teri says. “And I love the Causeway Coast. But it’s too bloody wet in winter to live there.”

I have, though, returned to Northern Ireland as a travel writer, covering matters far removed from policing and security. At least I’ve tried to…

   * * * 

Derry seemed confident of its pulling power. “Welcome to our historic walled city,” said a notice at the airport, in French and German as well as English. That confidence, on this particular morning, was not shared by Joan Pyne, in whose fine Georgian guest house I had booked a room. “We are ready for you,” she said. “But I thought you might chicken out when you heard the news.”

Ah, yes, the news. It used to be a convention in travel journalism that the news was something to be avoided; you wanted articles to have a longish shelf life, so you omitted mention of events that might date them — especially events that might deter tourists. I flouted that convention in the piece I wrote in 1997. I made it clear that I was in Derry, at the start of a train journey that would take me all the way to Cork, in the week leading up to the Twelfth of July. That’s the date when Protestants — with much waving of Union Jacks — commemorate the defeat in 1690 of the last British Catholic monarch, James II, by the Protestant King William (formerly Prince of Orange in Holland) at the Battle of the Boyne.

I mentioned that not to enrage the Northern Ireland Tourist Board, which had arranged my trip, but for fear of enraging my mother, who brought me up to tell the truth, however inconvenient. “Why did you pick this week, of all weeks, to come home?” she asked. Because it was one of the few weeks when I could easily get away from the office. So while the timing was accidental, it was not, in the piece I wrote, incidental.

How could it have been? Twenty-four hours after I arrived, the RUC had forced an Orange march down the Catholic Garvaghy Road in Drumcree, near Portadown; there followed a night of widespread rioting. Derry hadn’t stayed quiet.

Though I grew up in County Derry, I had been to what the broadcaster Gerry Anderson renamed “Stroke City” (Derry/Londonderry) only twice before. I had visited the Tower Museum, which somehow presents history without causing too much offence to either side, and the cobbled Craft Village, which, though it infringed the Trades Descriptions Act (it embraced a hairdressing salon), was a pleasant enough place in which to sip a coffee. This time, I caught the maiden city with its make-up off.

Five minutes’ walk from where Joan Pyne had talked passionately of conserving Derry, others had been intent on torching it. Vans and cars were burnt out, a bank’s frontage wrecked. The air smelt of charred wood. Most of the famous 17th-century walls, a mile round and 17 feet thick, had been closed. I tailed a flock of American tourists as they were shepherded around the one walkable section. It was impossible, in this atmosphere, to see the cannons, the same cannons with which Protestants withstood the siege of 1689, as mere historical artefacts. We stared along their black noses at the Bogside, whose painted walls yelled back: “No Consent, No Parade”; “No Sectarian Marches”.

Catholic Bogside, Protestant Waterside. I gave thanks that I had grown up in a part of the province where there was more mixing, more understanding. My smugness was short-lived. As I stood a while afterwards in St Columb’s Cathedral, marvelling at the brightness of its naturally lit interior in late afternoon, I was struck by an uncomfortable thought: this, the first Protestant cathedral built in the British Isles after the Reformation, was the first Protestant church I had ever entered in Northern Ireland.

Belfast was another first. I had never been into the city centre, but my imagination had coloured it grey. I stepped from Botanic Station to find a low sun turning the Victorian terraces gold. Couples sat over coffees at pavement cafés or strolled hand in hand to the Botanic Gardens. All this alfresco life, coupled with the designer flourishes of my hotel — sofas with butterfly-wing backs, light fittings like drooping snakes — put me fleetingly in mind of Barcelona (a city I’d first visited four years earlier). Then I saw an armoured car go past.

I had planned next day to take Citybus’s “Living History” tour to the Falls Road (the main Catholic thoroughfare) and the Shankill Road (its Protestant counterpart), but history was all too alive, and the tour had been cancelled. So I strolled along the narrow “entries”, or alleys, off Ann Street, one of the oldest parts of the city, sipped a pint in the Victorian splendour of the Crown Liquor Saloon, and browsed in the wonderful Linen Hall Library, where, amid the academics researching conflict studies and the Americans researching family trees, I sat next to a man reading Up The Shankill. His tattoos were not those of a pacifist.

Perhaps he was one of Frances’s clients. Frances sat next to me on the bus out of the city to Dundalk — the trains weren’t running because a signal box had been blown up. “Belfast’s a filthy city, isn’t it?” was her opening remark. I disagreed, but Frances was immovable. Not surprising, given her job: she “resettled” offenders, including terrorists. She had no illusions that she was reforming them. “They come out, supposedly born-again Christians, but it often seems done just for the parole.” And in Frances’s cheery company I crossed the border, entered Dundalk and got back on the rails to Dublin. 

From Dublin I took the efficient DART light railway to Sandycove, dropped my bags and went for a stroll. Sandycove is a prosperous place whose residents are given to strange habits. It’s in a Martello tower here (now the Joyce Museum) that James Joyce sets the first chapter of Ulysses. When Oliver St John Gogarty, a medical student and would-be poet, was renting the tower in 1904, he invited Joyce to join him and his Anglo-Irish friend, Samuel Chenevix Trench. Gogarty reports that Trench, who was obsessed with Irish culture, “removed all the oil lamp shades because they were not manufactured in Ireland but made of Belgian glass. As a result of his patriotism the place was filled with smoke.” 

He was even more dangerous when he acted on his dreams. On Joyce’s sixth night, we’re told on the museum’s website, “Trench woke up suddenly after dreaming of a black panther, and proceeded to get his revolver and shoot at the animal. Gogarty took the gun off him and let off a few rounds himself. A petrified Joyce left the Tower, never to return. A month later, he left Ireland for good to embark on a literary career on continental Europe.”

Sandycove is also famous for the Forty Foot, a swimming area named for the British Army’s 40th Regiment of Foot, whose soldiers used to be stationed in a battery above it. Men have been bathing here in the nude, summer and winter, for more than two centuries. After women asserted their right (in a protest in 1974) to join them, a “Togs Must Be Worn” sign went up, but many took no notice of it. As I stood on the rocks under a grey sky, a wrinkled old fellow plunged in in front of me, wearing nothing but a lime-coloured bathing cap.

Mercs and BMWs hugged the pavement above the water, their blue EU plates a suggestion that in this part of the island the arguments had long since moved on from the narrow issue of nationalism. But there were constants, too, from the blight of the pebble-dashed bungalow to a mystifying fondness for sliced white bread. On high streets on both sides of the border there were Jeansters, Abrakebabra and the family-owned, mass-market retailer Dunnes Stores; Marks and Spencer might have appropriated St Michael, but Dunnes had Saint Bernard.

If the North had been preoccupied with Drumcree, the South was preoccupied with Dunnes, and the £1.3 million in gifts received from the company’s former chairman by Charles Haughey, the former prime minister. As I sipped a coffee in a café-cum-bakery, the floury hand of the proprietor tapped my shoulder. “Can I take a squint at your [Irish] Times?” he asked. He considered the denunciations of Haughey and then said sorrowfully: “He was the best paper-seller they had when he was in the business.”

From Sandycove I took the DART again to Bray, to connect with the train to Wexford. For the first time since I had left Derry the weather was too cold for shirtsleeves. Black clouds followed the train, and by the time I reached Wexford rivers were running in the gutters. So much for “the sunny south-east”. I thought the landing craft moored outside my hotel a sensible precaution. It turned out that it was being readied not for evacuation but for a role in a Spielberg film, Private Ryan, being shot nearby.

I learned this next day from Ray Davis, as we sat in the Centenary Stores pub, toes tapping to a lunchtime session. Ray is from Tottenham, north London, but this Englishman’s home was now an Irish castle. He and his wife, Sue, were restoring a 15^th-century ruin at Carne, near Rosslare Harbour. They took me to see it, with its coach houses and barns now converted into self-catering cottages, and told me they believed it had been built by descendants of the earliest of all invaders from Britain — those who came over in 1170 with Strongbow, Earl of Pembroke.

I was to hear more of Strongbow in Waterford, to which Ray and Sue kindly gave me a lift. In marketing-speak, Waterford is “the Crystal City”, but it has much more to offer than a tour of a glass factory. Founded by the Vikings 1,100 years ago, it has the best preserved walls of any Irish city but Derry, and the oldest complete building in any Irish town, Reginald’s Tower. Here, it is said, Strongbow first met Aoife, daughter of Desmond MacMurrough, King of Leinster. Strongbow married Aoife and, on MacMurrough’s death, succeeded to the throne, at which point Henry II decided that the baron was getting too big for his boots. And so began centuries of conflict…

I was reminded of this by George Kavanagh, in whose guest house I stayed, and Jack Burtchaell, who allowed me to attach myself to the American visitors who were scampering in his wake on a walking tour of the city. At one point we came upon the letters IRA daubed on a Viking doorway. “Please excuse our youngsters,” Jack said. “It stands for ‘Idiots’ Recreation Area’.” It was a quip that could not have been uttered  so lightly, or so loudly, in that other walled city.

And it provided a conclusion to a journey that was not yet over. I would go on to Cork, to stroll briefly on its quays and streets before heading back to London. But I knew I had come to the end of the line. There was a symmetry, a neatness, in finishing here. Waterford’s history, Jack had shown, was still alive, but unlike Derry’s it was no longer dangerous.

* Teri is a late-developing drummer (though she learned piano as a child). Our  eldest grandchild, Aidan, when he was around eight, was keen to learn the drums. We bought him an electronic kit, so he could practise at our house without annoying the neighbours. Teri tried to book him lessons at a local music shop, but couldn’t find a time slot that was convenient for everyone. On the basis that a teacher has to be only one lesson ahead of her pupil, she signed up for sessions herself, and then passed on what she’d picked up. When Aidan moved on to other hobbies, Teri stuck with the drums, following an exam course, investing in an acoustic kit and playing in an amateur orchestra. We have friends who run a church and café in Sutton, Surrey. We happened to pop in for a coffee one day at a time when Teri was learning a new tune. Could she have a go on the acoustic kit in the church, she asked. Of course, our friends said. Which is how “London Calling”, from those punk rockers The Clash, came to be booming out from a corner in a Salvation Army church.

** John Hume died on August 3, 2020.